Legal Domain Ontology

[Tara Athan <taraathan@gmail.com>]

From the discussion today it sounds like part of LegalRuleML will be an ontology of concepts in the legal domain.
Somethings I would like to see clarified are:

1. to what extent will this ontology be taken from existing ontologies, including upper ontologies, such as DOLCE [1], or legal domain ontologies such as lkif [2], and to what extent will it be new;

2. is it desirable that the parts of the syntax that are dependent on the ontology be separable (through modularization) from the parts that are independent.

I would argue that in #1 as much as possible be used from existing ontologies provided these ontologies have a broad acceptance, and for #2 as much separation as possible, so that if/when the ontology evolves or is replaced, it has minimal effects on the syntax that is independent of the legal domain.



[1] www.loa.istc.cnr.it/DOLCE.html
[2] https://github.com/RinkeHoekstra/lkif-core